Theories of looking

Abstract

Love is a favourite theme of medieval narrative, yet in Western civilization love is a private experience, and one for which, in medieval texts especially, secrecy is often regarded as a prerequisite. How then can it be the theme of narrative, when to narrate, to tell, is to make public? This is the problem from which the present book begins; and it focuses on looking, and secondarily on listening, as the means by which private experience is brought into the public sphere. Within medieval love-narratives, secret observers, concealed from the lovers as the lovers are from society at large, are frequently represented as responsible for exposing private experience to the public gaze; as readers of or listeners to such narratives, we too can be made to feel that we are secret observers; and, in the later Middle Ages especially, the love-poet is often realized as one who looks and tells, himself a secret observer of experiences in which he does not participate. The verse-narratives I shall discuss in Chapters 3 to 14 fall into two large categories: those in the third person, in the form of romances and associated narratives, and those in the first person, in the form of dream-poems and analogous narratives or dits . Poems of other types that deal with human love might have been included; but the book is long enough already, and it seemed better to trace two connected traditions than to aim at a comprehensiveness that could only be sketchy.